No matter your background, food is an essential part of any holiday season, and a formative part of childhood memories around this time of year.

To celebrate the Bay Area’s diversity, we asked a number of cooks, chefs and restaurateurs about their most vivid holiday recollections and kitchen traditions.

From Jamaica to Belgium to Berkeley, some are simple and some are elaborate. Some are carried on from generations past; others are crafted anew. Many were the foundation of a lifelong love of cooking. All are memorable.

Happy holidays — here’s to creating more food memories during this holiday season.

Growing up (in Minnesota), my family is mostly Norwegian. We were super tight and got together a lot. Thanksgiving and Christmas were one giant season. We had our big feast on Thanksgiving, and it didn’t end until a little after Christmas.

My grandma was the baker of the family — that’s where I learned most of what I do. There was one cookie called krumkake, a liquidy batter baked in an iron and rolled on a pin, so they’re cone shaped, filled with fruit and berries and cream. Those we had all the time. We had little sanbakkelse, which I compare to a little fluted tart — you mostly fill them with cream. We had fattigman, spicy gingery cookies; Berlinakranse, which look like little wreaths and have pearl sugar on top; and rosettes, fried batter cookies.

My grandmother always had a pot of coffee on, so neighbors and friends would come by. There was constant traffic at her house. She’d have plates of cookies out all day long and coffee. When I think about that now, we don’t do that at all. People don’t just drop in and expect to have a conversation. We all lived super close to each other, so we were all in each other’s spaces.

Well, the holiday season is when I actually acquired my passion for cooking. On Christmas Day, we’d have an early meal at my great-aunt’s in the Fillmore, whose name was Minnie. Then, we’d have a later dinner at my grandmother’s house whose name is Lily Bell.

My brothers and I would open our gifts at home in the Fillmore. Then we’d walk over to my aunt’s house. She would have a full spread of food on the table by 9 a.m., full of cakes and pies. I still think that’s amazing. I don’t know how she did it. Cakes, pies, the macaroni-and-cheese, the turkey, the corn bread dressing. It’s pretty much stuffing but we call it corn bread dressing — corn bread, chicken stock, drippings from the goodness of the turkey, fresh sage. It’s delicious and is really something we only eat during the holidays.

We’d open presents there, and eat and congregate, and then do the same thing at my grandmother’s home in the Bayview. My grandmother’s peach cobbler was amazing. She taught me how to make that, and her caramel cake, when I was a teenager. The caramel cake is just basic vanilla cake, very moist, and she would make three layers. The caramel was made of evaporated milk, sugar and butter, and she would stir until thickened. It took 30 minutes, just standing at the stove and stirring.”

We’re all immigrated families from Korea. Every time, at this time of this year, we go to church. Regarding food, there’s not really a special food for us. Just Korean comfort food: bulgogi, kimchi soup, maybe some kind of Korean pancake. It’s kind of seasonal, made from flour and starches, and then we put anything in it — kimchi, seafood, green onions. Pretty much everything that’s left over.

My mother does the bulgogi. When she marinates it overnight, she uses kiwi to make it more tender and a little bit sour. My father makes kimchi soup. He used to live alone when he was in college, and like the pancakes, he puts everything he has in the refrigerator in it. But it’s not that special. Every Korean family does kimchi soup.

To drink, we have sikhye. It’s made of rice — fermented rice. It tastes like Mexican horchata. We have it more during the winter. It’s like a dessert.”

In Jalisco, Mexico, a lot of posadas were the main childhood memories. At traditional Mexican posadas, everyone brings something to the table: traditional dishes are empanadas, tamales, buñuelos. This was always held on Christmas Eve. Around this time, the next big food thing is the rosca (the ring-shaped king’s cake) on Jan. 6, Día de los Santos Reyes.

I was born in Mexico but I grew up here in the Central Valley. My childhood holidays were often spent in a theme park, usually Disneyland. We were a close-knit family. As for food, my mom always made tamales. Mole was a big thing for us, as was menudo. The mole we make is mole rojo. It’s a chocolate-based mole, and we’d eat it with chicken breast and some homemade tortillas on the side. Oh, and a bigger thing than mole was chilaquiles with a side of ribs. That was a Christmas thing for my family, and that’s my favorite.

One of my big memories was helping out my mother in the kitchen, doing dishes, setting up the table, cutting chicken. I just like being in the kitchen, and it has played a big role in my life, now providing for my family and myself.

Every year my family would get together a few days after Thanksgiving and prepare pasteles, a type of Puerto Rican tamale encased in unripe bananas rather than corn. Pasteles are laborious on so many levels.

It requires cooking three separate recipes: the masa, the braised filling and the sofrito, the savory herb paste that is the base to most Puerto Rican food. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation that requires hours of preparation.

My cousin and I, at the bottom of the totem pole, were “graters,” with the tedious task of hand-grating pounds of unripened bananas, plantains and yautia (taro) into a paste. My mom was the “cutter”; she’d unpeel and slice pounds of unripened bananas. My grandma was the “cook,” of course. She prepared the sofrito, cooked the braised filling and seasoned the masa with achiote, lard and milk until the masa was supple.

My cousin measured and counted the number of foil squares. Everyone would stand in her personal space around a large table and fold the uncooked masa into a parcel. Pyramids of shiny packages would start to pile up.

Every year, you could tell which pastele belonged to whom. My cousin’s was more of a crescent shape, my mom’s was a thin tube, my grandma’s was a fat rectangle and mine was some kind of malformed missile.

We cooked and prepped all day. Tempers flared, personalities clashed, the salsa music blasted, the rum flowed liberally.

Every year we swore was our last year. It wasn’t until my grandma passed away in May 2015 that I had to start a new tradition: making pasteles with just my mom, the last bit of family I have left.

When I think about Belgium, our tradition is very French in a way, so there are lots of rich dishes, lots of cream and seafood. The big tradition is to have a big meal on Christmas Eve. What Thanksgiving is for Americans, Christmas Eve is for Belgians. It has to be elaborate. Lots of little mousses and cream soups, lots of canapes and a four-course meal that usually takes you right to midnight, and then children open their presents.

People go all out. Caviar. Oysters. Champagne. Game of some sort, like pheasant or venison. It would be unheard of to do a potluck. My parents were here last year, and I was throwing a Christmas party and had invited guests to bring something that reminded them of their childhoods. My parents were horrified. They called home to my sister and said “Well, she’s throwing this party but people are expected to bring their own food!” In the end, though, they really liked it.

My food memories of Hanukkah are pretty standard: the latkes and the applesauce that we would make every year. My mom was not a big cook, so for the holidays it was when she did more involved cooking outside her normal routine.

Sometimes it would be just us, sometimes with the grandparents or the cousins. We made latkes because it’s Hanukkah and we had to do something traditional. My parents are actually very secular. We wanted to have some kind of family tradition. All the other kids were doing it because we were in Israel, so they wanted us to feel pretty normal. We made the standard variety: onion, potato, egg, flour. I like the crispier type. with the burned edges on the scraggly part.

One year, we had just moved into a new house and the menorah got lost in the shuffle, and so I thought: “I’m pretty handy. I’ll make one.” I cut a piece of 2-by-4 and hot-glued beer caps to it as candle holders. We lit the candle, we did the singing. You’re not supposed to blow out the candles — it’s bad luck or a faux pas. So we all went to our respective rooms. I was in the basement, and I saw my dad rushing by. Our entire kitchen table was on fire. Luckily, the house didn’t burn, but there was pretty good damage to the kitchen table.

Obrian (pictured): Growing up in Jamaica, Christmas is not really over the top, but when Christmas is approaching it’s a different environment.

Everybody’s going to eat all this food, and families are going to get together. Christmastime you make sorrel, a drink made from hibiscus. People start growing the sorrel (flowers) months before. When it’s time for harvest, you brew the sorrel for a month, shutting it in a glass jar (with sugar, ginger and spice) to ferment. Sometimes it’s served with Jamaican overproof rum. On Christmas, that’s what you serve on the table.

On Christmas Eve, you don’t go to bed. The street fills up with people, with jerk chicken stands, selling food and alcohol all night, and places set up all over with entertainment. Christmas Eve you spend with your friends, you mix and mingle. On Christmas, you have family dinner, with ham, the sorrel, rice and peas, goat and chicken.

Loris: My mom’s Jamaican and my dad is born and raised in Oakland by way of Texas. When the school day would be over, they would drop us off at my grandmother’s in West Oakland. On holidays, my grandmother would go to the Housewives’ Market (now called Swan’s Marketplace) to get a hog head and she would make hog head cheese. We always knew it was the holidays when we would go over and she’d have a hog head in the sink, ready to clean and cook. We’d dip the hog head cheese in vinegar. I don’t eat it now, but we really looked forward to that.

Dec. 24 is when we all get together and make food. We make pozole, romeritos, a special vegetable that you only eat at Christmas, and shrimp. You eat the shrimp and romeritos together. Traditionally, people didn’t eat meat on the holy days.

Every year since I arrived here, I’ve always made romeritos. I make them with mole and spinach because you can’t find romeritos here like you can in Mexico. I also make bacalao (cod) for my husband. My kids don’t like romeritos or bacalo, so I also make stuffed chicken breasts or pozole.

The family all gets together again for New Year’s and we eat similar meals: pozole and birria (a spicy stew made with lamb or goat). In Mexico, every single family will have a feast for Christmas.

In Mexico, the tradition we have for the beginning of the year is on Jan. 6, Three Kings Day (Dia de Reyes). The kids dress up and it’s a tradition for us to eat roscas, a wreath-shaped bread with a little doll stuffed inside, usually a baby Jesus. Whoever gets the slice of rosca with the doll inside becomes the host of the Candelaria party in February. In preparation, they crochet clothes to dress the baby as a sign of devotion and also make tamales for the family to eat. On Candelaria, the doll is presented in his new set of clothing. People bring the dolls to dinner with their family or to church. The tradition on Candelaria is to eat tamales. Sometimes they’re Oaxacan-style tamales, sometimes they’re green salsa with pork, chicken or sweet tamales. The traditions that we continue to celebrate here are Dia de Reyes. My kids and I get together every year, I make the dinner and we eat a rosca.

My youngest son is the most interested in learning how to make everything. He knows how to make practically everything we serve at the farmers’ market.

Growing up, my mom also used to always make moles for holidays. Red mole and green mole, heavy moles with chicken. For other parties in my family, it’s always chicken in guajillo sauce, spaghetti soup (no rice) or macaroni and cream.

We were raised vegetarian in Berkeley. For holidays, we would get these ham rolls made of soy. They came in a tube, and they had a ham one, they had a turkey one. We would get those every year. It definitely has come a way from that.

We grew up in a church setting, a new age spiritual church, so Christmas was a community event. When we were teenagers, we reunited with our grandfather, and he always did a Christmas pizza, so we still do that. We have a huge family, so we just do 20 pizzas. It used to be we had one vegan pizza. But now it’s like 19 vegan pizzas and one with normal cheese. If we have any Christmas tradition, that’s our Christmas Day tradition.

The one that really comes to mind is when I made prime rib for the first time. My folks don’t really eat out that much and don’t try a lot of new foods, but the one special-occasion food we did is prime rib at Christmas. When I got serious about cooking, I was a senior in high school, and I wanted to take it upon myself to do the prime rib that year

For my parents in Iowa, their medium-rare is more like a medium-well. I planned it all: waking up early, getting the sides prepared, getting the meat in the oven and having a lot of time to rest — and still eat at around 11:30 or noon. So I got up early, got everything started, and fell back asleep. I asked my mom to wake me up, but then I woke up at noon. I asked my mom why she didn’t wake me up, and she said she temped the meat and it was only at 130 degrees. I ripped the thing out of the oven, but by then it was already at 150.

I had the classic teenager meltdown, right on Christmas. For me it was the end of the world. My parents were like “It’s OK!” But I freaked everybody out and ended up cutting and cubing the meat, and mixing it with vegetables and served it as hash because I refused to serve this gray-ass prime rib.

I feel like a lot of us in the industry work so hard throughout the year and Christmas is our one time to go home and see our families. You think you’re not going to cook at home — and then you’re always the one that ends up cooking some kind of roast. I’m half Mexican and half Italian. My father’s side is from Florence, and the other side of my family is from Sonora, Mexico, so I grew up with Mexican and Italian food. We celebrate more Christmas Day. My mom takes all the bones and makes this really amazing broth, and we do a big sugo and a Mexican-style breakfast. My mom cooks everything.

Growing up, I had a really big family in the New Orleans area. We’d converge at my grandma’s house, and some things still stand out to me from then.

There was always gumbo — seafood and sausage gumbo. My mom would make this crazy giblets stuffing that I’ve never seen anywhere else. I’ve even looked online. She’d grind the giblets, almost like a sausage, and the onions and things, and then mix it all up and bake it. That’s one thing I still miss about not having the holidays at home. I don’t know if it’s a Creole thing. My mom is half Filipina, half Creole.

There was always an array of wild blackberry desserts. During the summer they’d take us kids out to the forest and pick blackberries. We’d freeze them and pull ’em out in the winter to make desserts. Pies, dumplings. I just remember this huge spread of blackberry desserts. It was very abundant, it was fun.

My wife is from the Midwest, but we don’t usually travel. We usually stay here and people visit us. My in-laws are pretty adventurous so I use that opportunity to try something new. There are no set traditions here in San Francisco.

We emigrated (from the Azores in Portugal) when I was 2. I don’t know what our Christmas traditions were back home. When we were growing up in the United States, we started doing turkey and stuffing right away. To this day we still do — I think my mom bakes the best stuffing, with corn bread, linguisa, the giblets and broth. But it seems very similar to the kinds of stuffing you see around here.

When I asked my mother about that, she said, no, we did stuffing back home, too. We’d just do it with chickens. There’s a big connection between California and the Azores, so my guess is that the tradition worked its way back that way.

I asked my mom, “What was Christmas like when you were a kid?” She said during those times everybody seemed happy. We didn’t have much. But we had food, and as long as we were healthy and our family was healthy, we just seemed happy. For Christmas, we’d put our shoes out by the wood stove. The next morning we would look forward to seeing some treats. It would be some dried figs or a piece of candy, and we’d be just as excited as we could be.

I was blown away, thinking about perspective, and how Christmas can go so awry when you throw in the material component. Just something as simple as a chicken and stuffing or dried figs in your shoe makes for a great Christmas.

This year I was getting deep into thinking about traditions. Even as a modern-day Mexican American California woman, what are those Mexican American traditions we hold true? And what’s the woman’s role in those? I was getting political in my own head.

My family is spread across California. I have in-laws in San Diego. My immediate family in Los Angeles. My husband and I are all up here in the Bay Area. I came here in 1993, and we have made it our home. We want to make sure our daughter has a Northern California reality.

My first memories of being alive are cleaning and sorting beans in the morning with my grandmother before she passed away. She was a hard-core desert woman from Chihuahua, Mexico, and crossed over 100 years ago. She was always working, always preparing for the family, always taking care of the family.

As a child, we all had jobs around Christmastime. My first memory around Christmas was to clean the corn husks for tamales. Since we’re from a desert part of Mexico, we only worked with the dried chiles and dried corn husks. The way the husks get delivered now they’re super clean, but back when I was growing up, they were kind of dirty, with dried corn silks in them. So my job was soaking, sorting and cleaning the corn husks. I had to be there in the hot sink for hours, just cleaning. As you get older you have another responsibility. Every year we get a little more responsibility but you’re always in the mix, you’re always part of the process.

Another thing, for us, the Southern California Chicano families, there’s a thing we always do — we always add a Mission black olive in the red chile tamale. That’s our shared little thing. I don’t know where it came from, but I love those little traditions that come back up.

Now we’re defining our own traditions. My husband is a California historian, and this year, he’s committed to doing a dish: He’s bringing back a recipe that his father, who passed away four years ago, made: A shredded beef sugo. Since he’s passed away, no one has made it. I’m happy my husband is reviving that dish. Maybe that will be our new Christmas Day tradition.